The Great Shift
Page 42
out of the earth, and afterward they will become as gods. For the souls remain unharmed among the deceased.
For the spirit is a loan of God to mortals, and (is in His) image.
For we have a body made out of earth, and when afterward we are resolved again into earth
we are mere dust; but [by] then the air has received our spirit . . .
We humans do not live a long time, but only for a season.
But our soul is immortal and lives ageless forever. (Sayings of Pseudo-Phocylides 100–115)
The New Testament reports that Paul encountered some incredulity in Athens when he spoke of bodily resurrection:
[Paul told the assembled:] “While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now He commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has fixed a day on which He will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom He has appointed, and of this He has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” (Acts 17:30–32)
The Kingship of God
One further manifestation of the changing character of Judaism in this period may be mentioned here. It is familiar to many Christians in John the Baptist’s call: “Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matt 3:2). In truth, this well known verse contains a somewhat misleading translation of the Hebrew malkhut shamayim. Toward the end of the biblical period, the word “Heaven” in Hebrew (shamayim) was often used as a way of avoiding saying “God,” just as we say in English, “Heaven knows when my refund will arrive,” which really means, “God only knows.” As for “kingdom” (malkhut), a better translation would be “kingship,” because the kingdom of Heaven was not originally some mysterious place; this phrase meant, quite simply, God’s making apparent His role as king and ruler over the world. This is what John the Baptist was referring to by saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”: soon enough, God will reassert His kingship, His power over the world, so repent before it’s too late. (This statement is paralleled in Mark 1:14, but with a significant change: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the good news.”)
But why should God’s kingship be “at hand,” that is, be about to come into effect? Isn’t His rule over all of reality already a fact now?14 This was the whole point of John the Baptist’s words. Toward the end of the biblical period, many Jews (like John) believed that God’s kingship had somehow been temporarily put on hold, or at least hidden from view. In fact, an anonymous contemporary of John’s said almost the same thing, foreseeing a time when
His kingdom will appear throughout His whole creation;
that is when the Devil will meet his end,
and sorrow will be led away with him. (Testament of Moses 10:1)
Here too, God’s kingship is slated to appear; for the present, it would seem, His kingship has been hidden. But when His kingship does return, the Devil and human suffering will come to an end. Such were the hopes and dreams of many Jews in first-century Judea.15
Taking a step backwards, one cannot but be struck by how things had changed. Now, it was the imminent reassertion of God’s kingship that people spoke of (including John the Baptist and the writers of the New Testament). But previously, the central claim of monotheism had been that God is and always has been the controller of all reality; He is, quite simply, the ruler of heaven and earth.16 A substantial group of psalms, known to scholars as the “enthronement psalms,” celebrate God’s kingship in the here-and-now: “The LORD is king! Let the earth rejoice” (Ps 97:1), “The LORD is king, let the nations tremble” (Ps 99:1), and so forth.17 Moreover, the idea of God’s control of the world underlies much of the Bible’s recounting of Israel’s history. Even the Assyrians’ capture and exile of Israel’s northern tribes (the “ten lost tribes”) and, later on, the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians—even these cataclysmic events could be, and were, fitted to the paradigm of a single divine power’s control of all. The explanation, simply put, was that God had been angry with His people and had punished them, first the Northerners, then the Judeans.
Following this, however, history seemed to have bogged down, as one occupying foreign power replaced another in running the land of Judea. The Persians, who had replaced the Babylonians in ruling Israel’s territory, were in turn conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, and the Greeks took over the Jewish homeland along with the rest of the region. One of Alexander’s generals, Ptolemy I, became the ruler of Egypt and outlying areas (including Judea) in 323 BCE. Judea continued to be governed by the Egyptian Ptolemies for a time, until they were ousted from Judea by the Hellenizing Seleucids, headquartered in Syria, just before the start of the second century BCE. True, the revolt of the (Jewish) Maccabees, starting in 166 BCE, provided the Jews with a brief taste of political independence, but this hardly led to a restoration of Israel’s long-lost empire and was short-lived. A century later, in 63 BCE, the Romans became the next occupying power to take over Judea.
The Romans were not particularly nice rulers, and they controlled much of everyday life in the Jewish homeland; directly or through their appointees, they decided affairs of state as well as micromanaging more local matters. If God had long ago determined Israel to be His own people, how could anyone account for the fact that this people was now being kicked around by the imperial army of a foreign power, indeed, by a nation that worshiped false gods, while our God stood on the sidelines? One could, of course, adopt the approach of The Book of Jubilees and say that all these ups and downs were simply the manipulations of the God of longue durée: “Don’t get lost in the moment,” was the message of Jubilees’ chronology, “God calculates time in multiples of the forty-nine-year jubilees.” In this same spirit, we saw that Psalm 145 asserts: “Your kingship (malkhut) is an everlasting kingship, and your rule [exists] in every age” (Ps 145:13).18 God is always in charge, so no need to worry about the temporary fluctuations of history. But as time went on and the Romans still weren’t leaving, many Jews became impatient. “Why doesn’t He do something?” they asked. One answer, now provided with increasing urgency, was that He was indeed about to act: “the kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” or rather, “God’s kingship is about to be revealed.”
Two millennia later, this is still the rub of monotheism. In fact, “Why doesn’t He do something?” is a question implicit in the very idea of one God alone ruling an inevitably imperfect world. The death of a single infant, in fact, the merest hangnail on a righteous man’s finger, might theoretically elicit the same question. But finding an answer becomes most urgent when this question is asked of the great events on the world stage, evil that affects not just a single individual or family, but whole populations. For modern Jews the question of course posed itself most directly with the events of World War II; one out of every three Jews in the world was killed by the Nazi extermination machine. A few decades later, the angry philosopher of Judaism, Israeli professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, was to say what many Jews thought: “God doesn’t save. He didn’t save in the Holocaust, and He doesn’t save now.” Leibowitz was a religious Jew, careful to keep the commandments of the Torah, but his God had no discernible connection to the events of this world. When a person complained to Leibowitz that he had lost his belief in God after the Holocaust, Leibowitz is said to have replied, “Then you never believed in Him in the first place.”
Our interest here is in the end of the biblical period and the time when God’s kingship (that is, the “kingdom of Heaven”) had become a phrase on everyone’s lips. Things must be about to change; God’s kingship will once again be made manifest. Mankind’s (or at least Judaism’s) search for God was at last to reach its positive conclusion.
The Messiah
It should be noted that, throughout the biblical period, major shifts in human affairs were generally conceived to be the result of, or to pass through, people, and to move from the top down.
Thus, only an actual king chosen by God, and not any abstract entity like “the balance of power,” “the economy,” or “improved international relations,” could bring about real change in the Jews’ fortunes. So it was that hopes for the return of the “kingship of God” came to focus on an expected human ruler whose reign would usher in the new reality. Our word messiah comes from an elegant Hebrew synonym for the word “king”: the mashiaḥ, “the anointed one,” was so called because kings were anointed by pouring fragrant oil on their heads to mark the start of their reign. During the last century BCE, expectations of the coming of such a future king had reached a fever pitch, at least in some segments of Jewish society. Among these expectants were the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Surely he could bring about the departure of the Romans from Judea and inaugurate the return of God’s kingship on earth. As his followers increased, so did the hope that the time was truly at hand. And then it all collapsed. Jesus was killed in the cruel form of execution practiced by the Romans, live crucifixion.19 Some of his followers must have despaired, assuming that his death proved that their messianic hopes had been in vain. Others, however, went on to create a new form of Judaism centered on the figure of the murdered Christ* (which only later became a separate religion, Christianity).
In the meantime, other Jews still hoped for the return of God’s kingship, and some of them were responsible for fomenting an outright revolt against the Romans. The Great Revolt (66–70 CE), as it is called, ended in catastrophic failure; when it was over, the Jerusalem Temple, the great, throbbing heart of Jewish piety, lay in ruins, and the attempt to throw off Roman rule had been utterly defeated (save for a few mountaintop pockets of resistance, which were wiped out in the course of the next three years). Even this, however, did not put an end to messianic hopes: it was not until another major attempt to oust Roman power, led by Simeon bar Kosiba (Bar Kokhba) in 132–35 CE, had been routed and the Jews exiled from Jerusalem that the revolutionary fervor began to die down.
Acceptance of God’s Kingship
And what of the kingship of God? In rabbinic writings of the second century CE and later, the kingship of God was still sometimes evoked in the old sense, as something that will appear imminently:
From your place, O King, appear and rule over us, for we are waiting for You. When will you rule [again] in Zion? Soon, in our time, and forevermore will You dwell . . . And our eyes will behold Your kingship, as is said in the songs [celebrating] Your might, transmitted by David your righteous king, “The Lord will rule forever, your God, O Zion, from age to age, Hallelujah!” (Jewish Kedushah prayer, the last line a quote from Ps. 146:10)
The Kaddish prayer, from late rabbinic times, likewise preserves the same expectation: “Let the great name [of God] be magnified and sanctified in the world that He created according to His own will, and let Him establish His kingship . . .”20
But in some rabbinic texts, the kingship of God acquires a new sense: it refers to an internal recognition of what is not obvious to the eyes. Thus, a Mishnaic text explains, in the daily recitation of the Shema, the worshiper is first to concentrate and “accept God’s kingship,” that is, concentrate and accept the idea of God’s sovereignty (despite what sometimes might appear); only then, having recognized His kingship, can the worshiper accept the “yoke of the commandments,” the duty to keep the things commanded in the Torah that were ordained by this God.
Why do the verses [of the Shema], beginning “Hear O Israel” [Deut 6:4–9], come before those that begin “And if you obey fully My commandments . . .” [Deut 11:13–21]? So that one may accept upon oneself the kingship of God (malkhut shamayim) first and after that accept upon oneself the yoke of the commandments.21
Here there is no apocalyptic event in the future that will reveal God’s utter control of reality to the world at large. Instead, God’s kingship is something that one must “accept upon oneself”—mentally. This act of acceptance is, as it were, a bit of enabling legislation that will allow a person to keep all of God’s commandments faithfully, since without the belief that God is indeed in charge, what reason would a person have to abide by all the Torah’s dos and don’ts?
Christianity, too, saw a shift in the meaning of the Kingdom of Heaven. In some early texts, its revelation is still a yearned-for event. Thus, the Lord’s Prayer says, “May Your kingdom [that is, Your kingship] come and Your will be done on earth, as it is [already being done] in heaven” (Matt 6:10 and parallels).22 In fact, the arrival of God’s kingdom is not far in the future:
And he said to them: “Truly I tell you, there are some people standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come—with force!” (Mark 9:1; cf. Matt 16:28, Luke 9:27)
Elsewhere, however, God’s kingship seems to have become—very much as in the later rabbinic texts cited above—something internalized, realized through a mental act:
Once he [Jesus] was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; they will not say, ‘Look! Here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:20–21)
An interesting parallel to this passage exists in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas, discovered in Egypt in 1945:
His disciples said to him, “When will [God’s] imperial reign come?” [He answered:] “It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, ‘Look here!’ or ‘Look there!’ Rather, the Father’s imperial rule is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.” (Thom. 113:4)
In either of these passages, as well as in numerous others in early Christian writings, the old sense of the “kingship of God” has been transformed, spiritualized. It no longer belongs to the reality just outside your window. It is not “with things that can be observed”; “people don’t see it.”23
And so, Jews of various allegiances (including those who, in later times, would call themselves Christians) fell into a state of cautious expectation. The Messiah would come, or would come again, at some point in the near future; in the meantime God’s kingship would remain asserted but not always evident. He was increasingly (to borrow a phrase from Isa 45:15) a kind of Deus absconditus, a God who, though hidden for the present, would eventually save Israel. In the meantime, He seemed to be content to control things from a distance.
There is much more to the religion of the Second Temple period than the specific items mentioned here, but I have highlighted these in particular both for what they show about our subject overall and for what they imply about the religions of Judaism and Christianity in somewhat later times. This was a period when, as we have seen, the fate of individual human beings seems to have gained new attention. This attention was expressed in late biblical psalms and still later statutory prayers, as well as in practices such as the daily recitation of the Shema and individual adherence to divine laws. God was watching you and, presumably, rewarding you individually for carrying out his commandments.24 At the same time, many of the writings of this period stress the great distance between God and humans. He presides in highest heaven, surrounded by angels and enthroned on the uppermost of three, or seven, celestial layers, while humans dwell way down below. So people pray to Him regularly without any specific request, but merely to “establish contact” and so gain His favor. Moving in the opposite direction, God no longer speaks principally to humans through the intermediation of His prophets, but via the words of His book, which had become a detailed guide for living one’s life. Indeed, keeping God’s laws in all their particulars (particulars that were often dependent on the elaborations introduced by ancient interpreters) became the central act of Jewish religiosity.
Prayer and other routine acts of devotion were never all there was to Second Temple religion; the whole idea of encountering God has always raised untrammeled possibilities, and in Second Temple times these sometimes led, as we have seen, to visions of humans ascending to heaven or questioning angels face-to-face dow
n here. But for the most part, the humble acts of turning to God in prayer at regular intervals and seeking to live in consonance with Scripture were indeed a way of binding one’s daily life to God, and their very fixity was, I believe, their most enduring legacy to later ages. The reason, I think, is that these two postures—the prayerful supplicant and the obedient servant—embody a specific way of fitting into the world, one that holds human beings to their fundamental smallness vis-à-vis the divine.
“But how different,” one might say, “is this way of encountering God from those of an earlier day!” So it may seem; certainly in this later disposition, much of the initiative in the divine-human encounter has passed from God to human beings. Yet what I have been suggesting is that this change (expressed in the dozens of little modifications and innovations chronicled above) ultimately had everything to do with the human beings—with their desire to encounter and truly know the divine, and along with this, their ongoing ability to adapt their apprehension of God to their own changing sense of what a human being is and does. Moreover, I have tried to suggest here and there in this survey that, viewed in its full perspective, the gap separating earlier apprehensions of the divine from later ones, while certainly not illusory, is not so great as it might first appear.
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Some Conclusions
This book began with a question: What was the “lived reality” of ancient Israelites’ encounters with God, when God was said to have appeared to Abraham and spoken directly to Moses and other prophets—and why has this reality disappeared for most people nowadays? The answer lies, I believe, in the various forms of encountering God surveyed in the preceding chapters, from earliest times to the Second Temple period and beyond.